Light Initiative and FIX8Group mastermind bespoke creations for the KOI Awards this weekend

The eighth KOI Awards is this Sunday, 4th October at London’s glamorous art deco Troxy, organised by The Association of Lighting Designers (ALD), The Society of Television & Lighting Design (STLD), The Fifth Estate Ltd and Clay Paky.

Light Initiative (LI) was asked to create the table centrepieces for the occasion, drawing on its talent for amazing LED designs.

“Light Initiative wanted to add something special to the Knight of Illumination evening, something not just beautiful and subtle, but with a real sense of fun for a room full of lighting designers,” says LI’s Bryn Williams. “For this event we created stunning, interactive centrepieces for each table that will allow guests to create their own lighting concepts. The touch-activated interfaces will allow the guests to create their own colour palette and effects.”

The centrepieces are based on Light Initiative’s own Infinity Tubes, and controlled by its embedded Electron media servers.

“We wanted anyone at the table to be able to take control, celebrating the creativity of every lighting designer,” Williams continues. “However, key to our concept was the sense of unity at this industry event. With this in mind, we have created a volumetric effect, giving the illusion of the waves of an ocean of light across the whole room: each is a part of the whole.

“They demonstrate further convergence of lighting and video innovation from Light Initiative – using video content to control the parameters of a lighting fixture, we are entering a new paradigm for lighting control.”

The unique and striking pieces were created specifically for KOI, but will be available for hire soon afterwards.

FIX8Group’s Richard Kenyon and Henry Crawfurd were approached to create the visuals for the KOI ceremony main screen.

“Our design concept was developed as a continuation of the previous year’s thematic imagery of a ‘starry night sky’, a nod to both the title of the ceremony and the obvious connotations evoked by the word ‘Illumination’,” says Kenyon. “Our primary focus was to develop a presentation that featured a variety of moving imagery that both captured and further expanded upon this theme. In many respects, you could say that we looked beyond the stars for inspiration, exploring and recreating the array of nebulae and galaxies that lay far beyond our own constellations. These astrological phenomena not only project/reflect light across the universe but some are believed to be regions of new star formations, a concept that we believe to be particularly fitting for an awards ceremony.”

Kenyon says that the initial design stages began with a simple pencil and paper to plan and storyboard designs. These designs were then recreated digitally using Adobe After Effects CC 2015 running on a Apple Mac Pro (additional After Effects plugins for this particular project included ‘TrapcodeForm/Particular’ and ‘Optical Flares’ to name a few). In order to operate this show live FIX8Group will be utilising Dataton Watchout Version 6 running on two custom servers.

“We’re thrilled to have two of the industry’s leading innovators creating especially for the KOI guests this year – we’ve had a sneak preview of FIX8Group’s visuals and Light Initiative’s centrepieces and they are incredible,” says Sarah Rushton-Read from The Fifth Estate. “We’d like to thank Bryn Williams and his Light Initiative team and Richard Kenyon, Henry Crawfurd and the FIX8Group team for adding even more sparkle and creative technological genius to KOI this year.”